Screen Digest has published a report in the last couple weeks regarding the mobile advertising market and it’s future. I was quite surprised by the report and even by comments and qoutes made for it in the games industry for example, and made by the author David MacQueen.

The report informs, that Mobile TV ad sales will be approximately 80 - 90% of all ad sales in the mobile industry. Now will that not be so in most of the world (excluding Japan probably):

  • Who wants to watch mobile TV anyway? There hasn’t really been determined if there is an actual need for mobile TV. All mobile TV pilots that I am familiar of in Europe were either largely unsuccesful, or were not even used by thousands of people.
  • Where are the handsets that are actually capable of mobile TV?
  • Where is the actual network capable of mobile TV?
  • Mobile internet is an actual market (please read my latest reports on Austria, and Czech Republic, those being the bad markets in Europe)
  • Being from a place where advertising market hasn’t really even accepted internet as a good medium (40% of the population use it), it’s hard to believe that companies and advertisers would invest in a fragment like mobile TV
  • It’s completely unsuitable for most mobile advertising, that is now invested in mobile (content providers, etc.), mobile TV ads also lose interactivity of possible click
  • Mobile phones are a gap medium, people don’t use it at work, people use it when travelling, for communication, for checking quick information = honestly the TV is not quick information.
  • Comparing a mobile phone as a medium to the actual PC as a medium = internet video advertising hasn’t really taken off in the world - Youtube still doesn’t have preroll ads, in most countries pre-rolls don’t really have the majority of the ads market. I take pre-rolls (ads shown before an actual video) as the most that you can get on the internet (or show me a streaming TV I can actually watch)

What do you believe? Feel free to discuss, this is a statement based on all the mobile experience I have, based on hundreds of thousands of people downloading our product and thousands giving feedback. I wonder if the analysts actually talk to the people, or only to the advertisers, which in the end are really hard when opening their wallets.

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